ABSTRACT
The Chinese overseas have been characterized as “essential outsiders” (Chirot and Reid 1997), “pariah entrepreneurs” (ibid.), and as residents “un-committal to host societies” (cf. Meisner 1999). With the advance of the modern global economy, some erroneously argued that the itinerantstransnationals, who commute frequently between the USA and other countries, “have become rootless and flexible citizens of ungrounded empires” (see Ong and Nonini 1996: 3-27). This chapter attempts to address these questions with data from fieldwork on US Chinese communities (Wong 1977, 1978, 1987), particularly, on the Chinese in Silicon Valley, California (Wong 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2006).
